July 27, 2019 at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, NYC

Schedule

Doors open

Our games expo hosts a variety of games from around the world. Check out all 3 floors of the expo! See the games section for full descriptions and links.

11:20AM

Opening message

The Game Devs of Color Expo Team & Xbox welcomes you to the event!

12:00PM

Microtalks

In this session, three game developers will share their thoughts about a variety of topics:

The Past Present & Future of Representation in Games

Failure and Feedback -- Pitching your game as a POC

Finding Strength in the Struggle: On Creating a Social Impact Game

Speakers:

Yussef Cole

Yussef Cole is a writer and motion designer hailing from the Bronx, NY. Much of his time is spent animating for the screen but he spends the rest of it thinking and writing about games.

Shana Bryant

Producer and 15-year veteran in the industry, Shana T Bryant has had a hand in crafting some of your favorite videogames (and might’ve even canceled a few). Shana speaks on everything from building teams and optimized game production to designing interactions for emerging tech and career management for underrepresented professionals. Shana is a published author, avid comic artist, and inclusive design geek, expounding ideas with a spoonful of charm and a touch of snark. For a deeper look, join her at theMushroomQueendom.com // terribleallies.com

Tanya Kan

Vivid Foundry Corp.

Tanya Kan is the founder and creative of Vivid Foundry Corp. This indie studio is developing the 3D visual novel Solace State, about youth defending their rights to a better future in a deeply unequal, tyrannical society. Her company creates original, artistic interactive stories that humanize social concerns and empower civic experiences. With over five years in interactive digital media work spanning Canada and Hong Kong, Tanya Kan wears multiple hats in design, 3D and 2D art, narrative writing, and indie game business administration.

12:40PM

Lunch time - go experience Harlem!

We encourage you to spend an hour outside and explore the neighborhood. There are delicious restaurants right by the Schomburg Center!

1:45PM

The Many Faces of Game Development

Artist. Coder. Designer. Dungeon Master. Teacher. These are all names for people who facilitate game creation, whether it’s through running a game, writing the code that runs the game, making the cards and boards where the game is played, or even giving students the freedom and the knowhow to make their own. This panel is here to dispel the myth of the one right way to make games, and our panelists will discuss the various and vastly different ways in which they do so.

Speakers:

Shawn Pierre

OriGaminc

Shawn Pierre doesn’t do much. Currently, he lives in Philly, and helps run the local meetup, currently known as Philly Dev Night. He also tries to make games.

Pattie Umali

Pattie Umali is an international education practitioner and game designer devoted to teaching youth about contemporary cultures and peoples. Pattie is the founder of InterIntellectus NFP, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization that aims to prepare individuals for global citizenship and the international workplace through technology, gaming, and media. She holds an MA in Intercultural and International Communication from American University and a BA in Sociology and International Relations from Brown University. Pattie recognizes tech and gaming as an effective way to spark early interest in global education and world cultures in the K-12 age group. Her international experiences have taught her the importance of interaction with people from other cultures. Pattie is leading a development team in building InterIntellectus' first video game, a fantasy adventure role-playing game set in World War II Philippines entitled The Girl Who Sees (www.girlwhosees.com). The game's social media presence focuses on the positive representation of Filipinos and the Philippines in media and pop culture, as well as encouraging the young Filipino diaspora to rediscover their indigenous Filipino roots.

MaryMartha E. Ford-Dieng

www.theultimateclapback.com

Losing her father at an early age and shouldered with the responsibility of caring for a disabled parent, MaryMartha is no stranger to difficult times. She turned her pain into play by developing the card game, The Ultimate Clap Back. She’s a supporter of mental health awareness, and speaks candidly about her diagnosis of anxiety and depression. She is a two-time award winning game developer, has survived brain surgery, and encourages others to be brave, fearless, and active participants in their quest for greatness.

Yvonne Thevenot

Yvonne began her career as a Systems Programmer and volunteer who taught programming logic to physically challenged students. She later immersed herself full time into the STEM education of underrepresented students, and, with the nonprofit Yvonne founded in 2015, STEM Kids NYC, seeks to utilize emancipatory pedagogy and culturally relevant instruction to teach kids how to code, engineer, and love Science. Yvonne is a Zankel Fellow at Columbia Teachers College, where she is developing Culturally Relevant STEM Curriculum and is a hockey mom.

Tara Walker - Moderator

Tara is a Technical Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, dedicating her time to help developers build apps, games, and technical solutions in the AWS cloud. Tara has most recently been working on evangelizing AWS cloud computing architectures and development for various technologies like Mobile, Gaming, IoT, AI, Serverless just to name a few.
Tara’s background is as a software engineer & developer who has worked on wide-ranging development platforms and systems while leveraging a myriad of development languages across her various technical and engineering roles. Over her 20-year career, she has been employed by various Fortune 500 companies.

2:35PM

The 128 Bit Personality

In the current games space using the internet to your benefit is absolutely crucial. From twitter to to twitch, there is a large swath of opportunities out there to get noticed. At the same time many people have the same questions: How do you stand out in a sea of streamers? How do you get your videos to go viral? How can streaming benefit your game development? Should I start a twitter war with Arbys to get myself recognized? In this panel we’ll hear from professionals working in game development, marketing, community organizing and more who will discuss how they’ve succeeded in this new space.

Speakers:

Sheila Moore

Sheila “DaPurpleSharpie” Moore is a spirited selfstarter in the fighting game community. She’s built her name around high-quality streams, tournament circuits, and a single-minded determination to improve her scene.

Tyriq Plummer

Tyriq Plummer is a Bay Area game dev currently making the roguelike platformer “Catacomb Kids”, which was successfully Kickstarted, Greenlit, and is currently wading to completion on Steam Early Access.

Mona Aiyed

Policy Enforcement Specialist, YouTube

Hello! I’m Mona, a Policy Specialist at YouTube! I help grow and protect communities on our platform!

TJ Hughes

Terrifying Jellyfish

An independent game developer and 3D artist out of St. Louis, Missouri, Tj Hughes taught himself game development in his early teens, and has since started his own company entitled “Terrifying Jellyfish”. Under this name, he intends on escaping the mundane and mediocre forever through the exorbitant use of color, playfulness, and aesthetics.

Jordan Minor - Moderator

Senior Editor, Geek.com

After spending four years surrounded by serious-minded journalism students, Jordan Minor enjoys using his degree to mostly write about video games, tech, entertainment, and being a big fan of the dumb internet. He’s the Senior Editor for Geek.com, so it must be working.

3:25PM

Fight the Power: Activism + Politics in Game Design

What does it mean to make games with an activist bent? Is it possible for politics to be expressed in a game, from the written stories to the designed systems, in a way that conveys that meaning to players? These are questions that many have asked, and our panelists will explain how they work to express their activism and politics in their work, as well as the work that inspires them.

Speakers:

A.M. Darke

A.M. Darke is a conceptual artist, game designer, and activist designing games for social impact. She created the award-winning card game Objectif, which explores the intersection of race, gender, and standards of beauty.

Tim Flusk

Tim Flusk is a subaltern fighter. The term subaltern refers to the populations which - along many axes - are excluded from the hegemonic power of the environment. Tim is attempting to study and produce games that fight for the representation and upliftment of all the marginalised

Keerthik Omanakuttan

Keerthik fell in love with video games playing Space Invaders on his dad’s lap at age 4. He grew up in Muscat, Oman, a podunk Middle Eastern town devoid of anything resembling a game industry. Since leaving for college at 18, he’s come to see how different places rich with gaming culture view it differently by way of Boston, San Francisco, London, Seoul and Japan. He runs a game-inspired fitness company while building a puzzle-based anti-grav racer and a board game on the side.

Dee Del Rosario

http://garbage.zone/

Dee Del Rosario (they/them or she/her) is an events and community organizer in games with organizations such as Seattle Indies and Different Games Collective, along with being a gamedev hobbyist. They currently work as a web developer and educator, currently teaching programming with a non-profit school for women and gender-diverse adults.

Shawn Allen - Moderator

Shawn makes (often political) art in the way of games (both digital and non), photography, poetry, and dystopian fiction. He also writes media criticism, with a focus on race/class and representation, as well as game design critique.

4:15PM

For the Culture

The discussion around games as culture is still fairly young when compared to other mediums. Often designers claim their games basically mean nothing, despite being heavy handed with metaphors while appropriating from numerous cultures all at once. Conversely, what if we took a step back and instead focused on working with our own culture, our beliefs, and our identities to give our work a distinct flavor that only we can? In this panel we will hear from several developers who will talk about what this means to them, and how this approach can be used to make games better.

Speakers:

Sandra Honigman - Moderator

Sandra is a Peruvian-American game developer currently working at Dots. There she is a game designer on Two Dots. She graduated from New York University with a BFA in Game Design and Dramatic Writing in 2016. She’s a sometimes cosplayer and a Sanrio enthusiast.

Emperatriz Ung

Emperatriz is a Chinese-Colombian writer and game designer from Southern California’s Inland Empire. In 2015 she was a fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Justice where she won a 2016 University & College Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She is pursuing her MFA in game design at NYU.

Elaine Gomez

Elaine Gomez is a Puerto Rican - Dominican game designer at E-Line Media, independent Unity developer and games educator. Elaine earned an MFA in Interactive Media and Games from University of Southern California in 2016. Her interests include the use of games and interactive media to preserve indigenous cultures, experimental game design, and methods for youth education in game development and computer programming. Elaine teaches game design at Rutgers University and at E-Line Media’s youth game studio initiative, Make Room.

Anthony Torres

Anthony Torres is a freelance game designer, Independent Unreal Engine developer, and Visual Concept Artist. Anthony earned a Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Game Art and Design from The Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 2016. His skills include the use of combining realistic and fantasy elements together in games, using unique programs to create vast environments, character building, as well as using different cultures, beliefs and ideas to create story settings for games.

5:05PM

Microtalks

In this session, three game developers will share their thoughts about a variety of topics:

Whaaat! PoC Don't Get Depression.

Roleplaying Romance

Developing a community, miles away from home

Speakers:

Bahiyya Khan

Watsup I’m Bahiyya and I’m a Muslim game developer from Johannesburg, South Africa. I’m currently doing my Masters in Experimental Narrative. I love pop-punk and indie music and reading stuff that blows my mind in a good way. I write poems and I make video games that I think are important and ought to exist outside of just my head. I do this so that people like me feel better understood and because I want to tell marginalised people’s stories. I love bread and trees.

Sharang Biswas

Sharang is an award-winning, internationally-published game designer, writer, and artist. He has exhibited games at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PioneerWorks in Brooklyn, and The Denny Gallery in Manhattan. His RPG Feast, won the IndieCade Dark Horse Award, and his boardgame Mad Science Foundation, was published in 2016 by Crypotzoic Entertainment. He regularly speaks at universities, conferences and museums, and writes for various magazines. Sharang holds a Masters from ITP at NYU-Tisch, and a Bachelors of Engineering from Dartmouth. He is the experience designer at The Medici Group, a strategy consulting firm focusing on diversity and innovation.

Juan Alejandro Rodriguez Morais

Juan moved to New Zealand to pursue his dream: Becoming a game developer. Throughout his journey, he has been able to work on numerous projects, acquire valuable life experiences and surround himself with great peers, all of whom have taught him great things. With support from friends and acquaintances, he co-founded the Panama Game Jam, a collective that hosts events with the game development community of Panama: Game Jams, workshops, meetups, talks. He is also the site organiser for the Global Game Jam in Panama.

5:35PM

Closing message

6:00PM

Doors close

7:00PM - 11:00PM

GDoC Expo Afterparty AT Babycastles

The official afterparty for GDoC Expo! Please join us at Babycastles (145 W 14th St., New York) to celebrate. Entry is FREE with your GDoC Expo badge (otherwise $5). More info here.

More information is coming soon. Subscribe to hear when we add new games, speakers, and more! We send emails less than once per week.

All are welcome

Game Devs of Color Expo is open to people of all genders, races, and sexual orientations. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to make you feel comfortable attending this event.

Thanks to our 2019 sponsors!

Pricing and Sponsorship

Game Devs of Color Expo is a labor of love, organized by a small handful of volunteers. We can’t do it alone. Ticket sales and sponsorship will help make Game Devs of Color Expo 2019 bigger, better, and as momentous as possible.

Interested in donating? Contact us at gdocexpo@gmail.com, send us direct donations via PayPal (our preferred method), or use the Donation field available under ticket types.

COLLABORATING SPONSORS

Experience a new generation of games and entertainment with Xbox. The best games and entertainment on all of your devices.

Join us in putting smiles on the faces of millions around the world. We’re welcoming, approachable and respectful – we’re Nintendo. All characters welcome!

Playdate is a brand-new handheld game system, shipping next year. Our small, yellow console-with-a-crank is the perfect platform for indie games of all kinds, made by people of all kinds. Sign up to be a developer today and let us help you tell your story! Learn more at https://play.date/dev

We are the world’s leading augmented reality company with an initial focus on augmented reality games. We see a future where our technology paves the way for new entertainment experiences, advanced robotics, and scaled adaptive computing — and games are where we incubate some of our most audacious thinking.

Looking Glass Factory is a team of developers, inventors and artists creating holographic displays for the future. Last Summer, they launched The Looking Glass, an interactive, holographic display for 3D creators. Real 3D in real life, no headgear required. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York with an R&D and production lab in Hong Kong.

PREMIUM SPONSORS

Kickstarter helps game developers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality.

MailChimp is an always-on marketing platform for small businesses. We make innovative, beautiful products that empower those businesses to find more customers.

Humble Bundle sells games, ebooks, software, and other digital content. Our mission is to support charity while providing awesome content to customers at great prices.

Twilio powers the future of business communications. Enabling phones, VoIP, and messaging to be embedded into web, desktop, and mobile software.

Catt is a product designer, game maker, and developer who enjoys creating interactive experiences and helping people to become their best selves.

Very special thanks to our contributors (Reynaldo Vargas, Mattia Sicuro, Kat Thompson, Kirk Musngi, Emperatriz Ung), and the many volunteers who work on bringing the expo to life before, during, and after the day of the event.